Get in touch if you’d like to join a community for product leaders in the public sector. The best way to get in touch is to connect with me on LinkedIn. Or you can comment below.

Why

Product leaders need safe spaces to share and learn from one another. But we don’t have many of these spaces. Public sector product leaders are especially poorly served, with a lot of stuff aimed at commercial sector.

Personally, I’ve hit the public sector trifecta of Central Govt, Local Govt and Charity product leadership roles and realised we all have the same problems and same opportunities. I’ve been working in Higher Education rcently and the same is true. My personal aim is for us to have a safe space. And somewhere to support the next generation of product leaders.

I took a punt and shared a LinkedIn post inviting folks to join this new thing, figuring we might get 10-20 interested.

Who

We’ve quickly gotten to 58 people across Central Govt, Local Govt, NHS, and Charity. Ace!

Anyone wanting to join with a title of Lead Product Manager, Principle Product Manager, Head of Product, Assistant Director of Product, Director of Product, or Chief Product Offier is immediately approved. For others I review their role - we don’t want to be purist around roles - we do want this to be a safe space for people with similar challenges and opportunities.

I’m facilitating the community to get it off the ground. I’m doing this as me, Scott. Herd, where I work is sponsoring this by allowing me to do it ‘on the clock’. And have agreed there is nothing expected in return, it’s simply a way of accomplishing our social mission to support the professions of product management and business analysis. Some folks from the community are going to join me in facilitating in the next couple of weeks so leadership and ownership will inreasingly be shared.

How

We use WhatsApp Comunity. WhatsApp’s worked best of the social media platforms for professional stuff in the past so took a gamble it’d be the same here. So far, so good. WhatsApp Community lets us have a single main community. And loads of topic-based chats people can choose to be in or not.

What

We share and support each other in a safe space. Topics include platforms and components, programme –> product, meetups, recruitment. And stickers.

Our first meetup is a lunchtime videocall. Microsoft Teams is the most accessible software to use.

And we’re going to arrange our first real life meetup.

Get in touch if you’d like to join a community for product leaders in the public sector. The best way to get in touch is to connect with me on LinkedIn. Or you can comment below.